Citations:main character

Noun: "(Internet slang, idiomatic) a person who becomes a focal point of discussion on a social media platform (particularly Twitter)"

 * 2020, Isaiah Colbert, "Opinion: A Parody Farewell For A Parody President", The Columbia Chronicle (Columbia College Chicago), 16 November 2020, page 14:
 * This won't be the last time we hear from him. He is sure to vie for the main character of Twitter and continue his rallies as he reportedly intends to "Make America Great Again" when he runs for president again in 2024, according to Axios.
 * 2020, Erin Vanderhoof, "In 2020, We Were Finally Ready for Fleetwood Mac and Steely Dan Again", Vanity Fair, 11 December 2020:
 * Saltz was at least partially trolling, and besides, he’d already displayed some skill at becoming Twitter’s main character in April, when he posted a truly deranged photo of his pandemic-era coffee order.
 * 2020, Paul Farhi, "How the dusty old op-ed pages became the red-hot outrage-generating machine of 2020", The Washington Post, 28 December 2020 (image caption):
 * With his Jill Biden essay, Joseph Epstein became Twitter’s main character this month.
 * 2021, Dani Di Placido, "The Ballad Of ‘Bean Dad’ Shows The Cruel, Petty Side Of Twitter", Forbes, 5 January 2021:
 * Unless you’re in the business of receiving hate clicks for profit, you never want to be the “main character” of Twitter.
 * 2021, Chris Murphy, "What Exactly Is Going On With Ellie Kemper?", Vanity Fair, 3 June 2021:
 * The upshot: Kemper had won the unenviable role of “Main Character of Twitter,” trending on the site for over a day and racking up over 28k tweets in the process.
 * 2022, Amanda Schupak, "Mary Annaïse Heglar Is on a Furious Crusade to Bully Big Oil Out of Existence", The Daily Beast, 24 March 2022:
 * “Shell became the main character [of Twitter] for the day,” Heglar recalled, cracking up as she told the story.
 * 2022, Matt Baume, "Slog AM: More Bad Supreme Court Rulings, One More Day of Heat, and a Lidding I-5 Tour This Afternoon", The Stranger, 27 June 2022:
 * The main character of Twitter this weekend was Zoe Warren, who brilliantly articulated the frustration that Democratic leaders had weeks to come up with a response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the best that many of them could do was basically “give us $15 and vote harder.”
 * 2022, Delia Cai, "How Elon Musk Became the Internet’s New Main Character", Vanity Fair, 14 July 2022:
 * And while Trump, at least, now faces a reckoning over his most consequential tweets via the January 6 hearings, one final way to understand Elon Musk as our new main character is to consider the internet that has incentivized the rise of both men.
 * 2022, Samantha Cole, "You Can Now Become Twitter’s Main Character for Literally Anything", Vice, 25 October 2022:
 * For a long time, for the most part, if you were a random person (a non-famous person without many followers and without a public-facing job) tweeting about innocuous things (nice things in your own life), you could be reasonably sure—unless you said something so bad that it broke through to mainstream, viral Twitter—that you would be unlikely to become a main character or otherwise canceled. No longer.
 * 2022, Cam Wilson, "Elon Musk is Twitter’s final main character", Crikey, 22 November 2022:
 * It has made Musk into Twitter’s permanent main character, which, in my opinion, has always been his motivation for buying it.
 * 2022, Ethan Zuckerman, "What we would lose in a world without Twitter", Prospect Magazine, 8 December 2022:
 * Becoming Twitter’s main character is usually a prelude to toxic levels of visibility, public shaming or, at a minimum, a wave of online harassment.
 * 2022, Alex Harn, "TechScape: Four stories that sum up the state of tech in 2022", The Guardian, 27 December 2022:
 * Elon Musk bought his way into being the main character of Twitter, for good.
 * 2023, Margaret Hartmann, "Elon Musk Rigged Twitter to Force Us to Read His Tweets", New York Magazine, 15 February 2023:
 * As many have pointed out, Elon Musk upended the axiom “Each day on Twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it.” Since Musk bought Twitter in October, he’s been the site’s only main character.
 * 2023, Nitish Pahwa, "What Happens After You Become a Main Character on Elon Musk’s Twitter", Slate, 2 March 2023:
 * That Twitter’s changes had produced a new generation of “main characters” became apparent in January with the viral fame of “menswear dude,” aka fashion blogger Derek Guy, whose @DieWorkwear account had been recommended to many tweeters with little interest in fashion.